I love OS X, and in general find Apple’s software on the platform extremely high-quality, but when it comes to running Apple’s software on Windows…well, it’s an entirely different ballgame. Safari uses its own widgets, windows, and font rendering, which makes it look utterly out of place on my desktop. QuickTime for years simply looked bizarre, using a window to hold just the menu bar, and then other windows to hold the movies. iTunes uses Windows-native font rendering and some native widgets,...

Google has begun digitizing old newspapers, making certain old Onion stories a bit less funny. I hope it goes without saying that I love technology, but…at the same time, there’s something I used to find infinitely more gratifying about having to use card catalogs, paper indexes, and microfiche. That romantic nostalgia makes me keep my diaries in Moleskines and sketchbooks, causes me to allow piles of books to keep refuge in my apartment, strikes fear into my heart when I see the disturbingly...

You have successfully discovered Morphic. Can you discover Smalltalk too, as long as you’re at it?

This was kind of funny, until it really processed that I’ve got three more confirmed trips this year and a fourth in planning stages with a fifth likely—and that’s only good enough to be #2 in my network. I might want to admit I have a travel addiction.

In other news, Honda takes a cue from Microsoft and makes a unique car that totally doesn’t borrow any ideas from any of its competitors. Keep on bringing that innovation, Honda.

When 280slides was released several months ago, it was notable in several ways. It looked like a native OS X app despite running in the browser, yet remained relatively responsive, worked quite well across browsers, and gracefully fell back to Flash when running on browsers from the Pacific northwest. The designers said that their secret sauce was Objective-J—an Objective-C–like language that compiled to JavaScript—and Cappuccino, a Cocoa-like framework that let them treat a web browswer as just...

Braid’s been receiving accolades for its amazing gameplay and complex storyline. Over at Gamasutra, I stumbled upon a great article detailing the evolution of Braid’s artwork. Especially after having beaten the game, I found it fascinating to see how the art had evolved, and had helped to give the game its unique feel.

Moving us one step closer to Blade Runner, I’m pleased to bring you a fully robotic water snake. Although the snake at first appears to be little more than a toy, its movements are preternaturally organic. I have a very easy time believing that I’m looking at some type of exotic life form—and I find that simultaneously amazing and frightening. Philip K. Dick would be proud.

I’ve never been an especially big fan of Python—faster but less powerful than Ruby, slower and less powerful than Smalltalk and Common Lisp, and not as usefully grungy as Perl—but I’ve become a rather strong pragmatist vis-à-vis programming languages, and realize that Python probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so I’ve been trying to improve my proficiency through activities such as Django Dash (which Tyler and I won) and small coding projects, such as the one-off tasks I have to do at...

Given I know a few people myself who don’t own cellphones, I found defective yeti’s list of how people’s reaction to the discovery he does not have a cell phone has changed over the course of the last decade spot-on and hilarious.